Bing Crosby (64 page)

The new Bing, projected in the mid- and late 1930s, was propelled on four fronts: movies, records, radio, and public relations.
In each arena he was guided by knowing and determined pilots, true believers.

Six months before his death, Bing was asked by a radio interviewer whom he would most like to thank for his success. He gave
what had become his standard answer: “I think it would be the A and R man at Brunswick and then Decca Records, Jack Kapp.
I was just going on the air for the first time when I signed with him and he had me on a recording program that embraced every
type of music — sextets, choral music, light opera, liederspiel, jazz, ballads, comic songs, plays, recitations…. And that
kind of diversified record program, I believe, was the most important thing in the advancement of my career. I thought he
was crazy, but I did what he told me.” The interviewer observed that Bing simply took hold of every opportunity, to which
Bing rejoined: “I wasn’t doing it. He was doing it. He’d say, ‘You ought to do this,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, Jack, this is silly.’And
he’d say, ‘You come on down and do it,’and I’d do it because I thought he was a nice guy and he had good taste. I know I didn’t
have any. I just did it because he wanted me to.”
²

Jack Kapp and Bing Crosby had at least four things in common: outsize ears, a love of Al Jolson, remarkably retentive memories,
and the belief that in matters of taste, the public is usually right. The last did not come naturally to Bing, but Jack patiently
converted him, one record at a time, overcoming Bing’s misgivings and downright disdain. Jack did not live long enough to
witness the inevitable split between mass taste and his own, though it is entirely possible he might have
rolled with the punches for another generation. Bing, who lived long enough to feel abandoned, attempted to roll and even
rock, following the dictum of the man he increasingly prized as the principal architect of his career. Kapp’s law was simple:
melody. His brother, Dave, during a vacation in Virginia, photographed a statue of Pocahontas with her arms raised in prayer
and added Jack’s mantra as a caption, “Where’s the melody?” Dave mailed the picture to Jack, who enlarged it, printed several
copies, and posted them in Studio A and other strategic places in the Decca offices.

In Bing. Kapp recognized the ultimate melodist, a true bard for the times. It was Kapp who stubbornly clung to the idea that
Bing could become America’s voice, the first Everyman singer. He had to combat cynics who characterized Bing as a mewling
crooner, which was easy enough, but he also had to mollify and restrict Bing while convincing him of his potential. Jack,
who could not play or sing a note, was Bing’s most formidable collaborator. “I regard his association with me as something
of a sacred trust,” Kapp would write in 1949. “Moreover, I believe there has been a mutuality of faith, and from that mutual
faith came the renascence of an industry which was once decadent and which is now a source of world-wide entertainment and
cultural education.”
³

Bing trusted him unequivocally. “All the song-pluggers that used to annoy the artists asked him to record their songs or sing
them on the radio,” recalled Frieda Kapp, Jack’s widow. “But he wouldn’t. He would say, ‘If Jack says I should do it, I’ll
do it.’ That’s how loyal he was.”
⁴
Asked to name the important people in his career, Bing offered a fairly consistent list over the years, including his mother
and father, Everett, Leo McCarey, William Paley, John O’Melveny, Buddy DeSylva, and one or two more. But he always began with
Jack and always for the same reason: his policy of musical diversification. Bing rarely included anyone in that litany with
whom he had a personal or formative association, except his parents and Everett. Unless specifically asked, he did not short-list
Al Rinker, Paul Whiteman, Harry Barris, Eddie Lang, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, or even Dixie. He kept a separate mental
file for the power brokers and advisers who had helped him mold his career, publicly honoring them yet keeping them at bay.
As much as he and Jack liked each other, they rarely socialized. As far as Frieda could recall, they never dined alone.

Frieda could not figure it out: “Bing was very, very fond of my husband, but he was a cold person to know. We bought a house
on East Sixty-fourth Street during the war, when the prices were down to nothing, a beautiful five-story house. And Bing came
to New York one year, and Jack would have loved to have him come to our house. But he wouldn’t. The next day in the studio,
Jack says, ‘What did you do over the weekend?’ He said, ‘Oh, I went to a Jewish show.’ So Jack says, ‘What did you do in a
Jewish show? You don’t understand Yiddish.’ Bing says, ‘I didn’t have to. The woman sitting next to me told me what was going
on.’Jack would have been proud to show him that house, but Bing would never let anyone get that close. But Jack was crazy
about him.”
⁵

Bing was crazy about Jack, too; he forbade his business manager from auditing Decca royalty statements (until after Jack’s
death), for fear of embarrassing him. “If he was your friend, he was a good friend,” Frieda said. Yet he could be oddly unfeeling.
In the late thirties, the Kapps stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the summer months, while Jack recorded. One night
they threw an elaborate party in Bing’s honor at the hotel swimming pool, with Jimmy Durante leading the orchestra. “There
must have been about two, three hundred people there that night,” Frieda recalled. “Hours go by and no Bing. Never showed
up. Never showed up. Forgot.”
⁶

Nothing underscored the bond between them more than Bing’s steady refusal of incredibly lucrative offers from rival labels
— at one point nearly $6,000 a disc. “The idea of working for anyone else was preposterous to me,” Bing wrote, “and I never
gave those offers serious consideration. With Jack I felt that I was in the hands of a friend and that whatever he told me
to do was right. “
⁷

Bing’s allegiance made Decca possible. The record industry hit rock bottom in 1932 and 1933, and yet — as Kapp complained
to anyone he could buttonhole — the companies stubbornly refused to lower the price of discs, which sold for seventy-five
cents or a dollar. In 1921, 110 million discs were sold; Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering” alone accounted for 2 million sales.
In 1933 the total figure was down to 10 million. Many people were certain that the business was bound for obsolescence. Desperate
to recoup a fraction of their losses, record labels merged or dissolved. By 1934 only two were standing: Victor, which was
shielded by RCA’s radio network, and the American
Record Company (ARC), a branch of Consolidated Film Industries, which monopolized the market for bargain discs (stock arrangements,
unknown singers) in chain stores like Woolworth’s. As a holding company, ARC acquired Columbia and several smaller labels.
Artist royalties counted for little in that climate, when the average disc moved a thousand copies and hits were tabulated
in the realm of 40,000 sales, sometimes as few as 20,000. “Love in Bloom” was considered a smash at 36,000. Yet Bing refused
the big advances, wagering that Kapp could restore the industry.

Jack Kapp was born in Chicago on July 15, 1901, the eldest of four children.
⁸
His Russian immigrant father, Meyer, became a distributor for Columbia Records in 1905 and opened the Imperial Talking Machine
Shop, selling phonographs, discs, cylinders, and sheet music. Jack went into the business immediately after high school and
displayed a singular flair for sales; he was said to have memorized the catalog numbers of every record in the store’s inventory
as well as the addresses and phone numbers of faithful customers. He married Frieda Lutz, his childhood sweetheart, in 1922
and with his younger brother, Dave, opened the Kapp Record Store. Four years later he joined Brunswick-Balke-Collender, a
company that made bowling balls and billiard tables and operated Brunswick Records and its race affiliate (distributed largely
in black neighborhoods), Vocalion. Put in charge of Vocalion, Jack hired a black recording director, J. Mayo Williams, and
scouted, signed, or produced such legendary musicians as King Oliver, Jimmie Noone, Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Andy Kirk,
and Louis Armstrong (whose OKeh contract he dodged by releasing the discs as Lil’s Hot Shots), as well as hillbilly, blues,
and jug bands. He also worked with established Brunswick stars such as Al Jolson, Fletcher Henderson, and Ted Lewis, developing
personal relationships with them all.

In 1930, largely as a result of Jolson’s hugely successful hit “Sonny Boy,” which Kapp recorded over the protests of his employers,
Warner Bros. bought Brunswick for $5 million and relocated Jack to New York, where he worked with comptroller Milton Rackmil.
As general manager of recording, he hired Victor Young as his house conductor and signed Bing, Mildred Bailey, the Mills Brothers,
the Boswell Sisters, Glen Gray, Cab Calloway, and more, an exceedingly
smart roster. But Warners had not figured on the Depression and soon wanted out of the record business. While maintaining
ownership (the sales value was meager), Warners practically gave the company to ARC on a ten-year lease, hoping for royalties
down the road. With Brunswick now established as ARC’s flagship, Kapp recorded more than ever. The company dispatched him
to England in 1932, to sell Brunswick’s British franchise to the audacious stockbroker, Edward R. Lewis.

Three years earlier Lewis had taken control of the foundering English Decca Company and turned it around. The mysterious name,
Decca, coined in 1916 by a company that produced the first portable gramophone, has no meaning. According to Decca producer
and historian Geoff Milne, it was devised, like Kodak, as a word that can be pronounced only one way anywhere in the world.
Lewis needed a source for American artists, and Brunswick was ideal. By 1934 Bing sold more discs in England than in the United
States; “Please” exceeded 60,000 sales and “The Last Round-Up” 80,000, double the numbers in America. Despite discrete backgrounds,
Kapp (the Chicago Jew) and Lewis (the future knight of the realm) spoke a similar lingo concerning records. Lewis endorsed
Jack’s conviction that the industry’s salvation lay in marketing premium performers on premium labels at bargain prices. They
hatched a plan.

When Brunswick’s president, Edward Wallerstein, disclosed that he was going to Victor, Jack was certain the company would
appoint him president. In April 1934 Kapp, Rackmil, and Columbia sales manager E. F. Stevens induced Lewis to finance a 50
percent option on the still independent Columbia for what Lewis described as “the astonishingly low price of $75,000,” plus
an option to buy Brunswick from Consolidated Film.
⁹
The idea was to fold Columbia into Brunswick, creating a new combine that would in turn be purchased by English Decca. Arriving
in the United States for the first time, Lewis was greeted at the dock by his lawyer, Milton Diamond, and an underwriter.
(Curiously, he sought the participation of William Paley, who declined; four years later, after the industry rebounded, thanks
largely to Decca, Paley’s CBS bought ARC for nearly ten times as much — a bargain even at that price.) Kapp assured Lewis
that in the unlikely event he was blocked from Brunswick’s presidency, he would resign and take Bing, whose contract had an
escape clause allowing
him to leave with Jack. Lewis went home thinking the deal was set. But as soon as he arrived in Southampton, Diamond summoned
him back. They had been betrayed.

Consolidated Film’s ARC had bought Columbia (for $70,500) and reneged on the Brunswick option. “We decided there and then,”
Lewis recalled, “to form a new record company.”
¹⁰
Kapp prepared to resign, as promised, and so did Rackmil and Stevens. On the surface, the venture seemed nuts. All but Lewis
would be leaving lucrative positions without even having an office to go to; indeed, for several weeks they operated out of
Milton Diamond’s suite. But Kapp convinced Lewis they had everything but financing: the most popular singer in the United
States as well as the goodwill of numerous top artists, producers, and distributors who liked and believed in Jack. Furthermore,
he was certain they could cut a deal with Warners Bros. to buy a pressing plant and office space that had fallen into disuse
when ARC took Brunswick off the movie studio’s hands. Above all, they had a radical idea: premium records at discount prices.

Lewis believed, contrary to common wisdom, that “the end of an unparalleled slump” was the ideal time to start a company.
He was convinced of a “terrific latent demand for records,” if they were affordable.
¹¹
The men made their plans, and on July 14 Lewis sailed home once again. Two days later Kapp resigned his post at Brunswick.
He wired Bing, who agreed to stick with him in the absence of a written contract, for a $10,000 guarantee. Jack immediately
announced the formation of a new record company, Decca, with himself president (Lewis grudgingly allowed him the title, believing
he held the balance of power as chairman and chief stockholder), Stevens vice president, Rackmil treasurer, and Diamond secretary.
English Decca issued 25,000 common shares, holding 18,000, which it used to procure subscriptions to raise a $250,000 operational
base. Remaining shares were divided among Jack (1,250), Stevens (750), and Warners (5,000). When Jack declared that a Decca
disc would sell at fifty cents, the industry rolled its eyes and groaned. “If Decca can’t get 75 cents for Crosby, Casa Loma,
etc., just as Brunswick, then what’s the use?” a nonplussed
Variety
asked.
¹²

The loyalties Kapp had cultivated paid off instantly. Brunswick thought its roster impregnable, but every artist represented
by Rockwell-O’Keefe followed Bing to Decca — Glen Gray’s Casa Loma
band, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. Victor Young hired on as Decca’s music director and
house conductor. Guy Lombardo, Isham Jones, Ted Lewis, and Earl Hines also made the leap, as did such new additions to the
Kapp family as Chick Webb, Ethel Waters, Art Tatum, Noble Sissle, Johnny Mercer, Jimmie Lunceford, and Bob Crosby, a middling
singer who, at twenty-one, was appointed front man for a cooperative orchestra that made its name combining swing and Dixieland.
Within a year Jack enjoyed the particularly sweet coup of signing Louis Armstrong, the beginning of a twenty-year association
with Decca. Kapp gutted Brunswick’s production team, too, recruiting engineers and producers, among them J. Mayo Williams
and Joe Perry, who he asked to set up Decca’s Los Angeles studio and supervise recording sessions by Bing and others.